With this book a long journey has reached its destination. It started in October 1990 after a trip to Tromsø, Norway, where I read a proposal for a program in documentation studies. Subsequently, I wrote down my first thoughts on what such a program could look like and how documentation studies could be outlined as a discipline. This paper was published in Norway in 1991 and, after some back and forth, I was asked in 1995 both to prepare the program in documentation studies and also to draw up a new outline of documentation studies to function as a curriculum for the program, which was aimed at educating librarians, archivists and other document managers.

The first students started in 1996 and graduated in the following years. Many asked what they would learn and what kind of competence and qualifications they would gain from the program. They were not formally educated as librarians per se, nor in library and information science, but they were just as capable and qualified to work as librarians as their colleagues educated as librarians/LIS professionals. As I mentioned at the Nordic–British LIS conference in 1999: ‘Documentation Studies is close to LIS, but not quite the same.’ Graduates of the program became documentation scholars and in this way contributed with a new perspective to the LIS field as well as in other areas where they eventually worked.

To sustain and support this position it was important to have an ongoing discussion on how to define and conduct documentation studies. To that end, this book should have been published many years ago, but along the way, not least within our international forum, The Document Academy, and its annual meetings, DOCAM, there have been many discussions on what is documen tation studies, what is documentation, and what is a document.

The core of this book was drafted during my first sabbatical at UC-Berkeley in the spring of 2001. In the following years, and until my retirement in 2014, in order to test my basic thinking I made many detours through all kinds of projects around a general discipline in documentation studies. Finally I began to travel less and spend more time at my desk, writing.